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Obscure interests

First of all: why did I use the image above? Because I don’t like any of the stock art available for the term “hiccups”, and I do love Toothless and his boss. So if you think this is going to be anything to do with How To Train Your Dragon, please be disabused of the idea. This post is about curing hiccups.

It’s a copy of information that appears elsewhere about the one true “magic” trick I know. Somebody just retweeted the Google Plus post I did about it some years back, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a copy here at my own blog. Seems like an omission. So here it is.

Disclaimer: I know that this is one of those endlessly contentious subjects, and there will be people who rise up immediately and insist “That’s not how it works at all” and will cry BUSHWAH and so forth. I’m entirely happy for them to do that, and I wish for them that Their Mileage May Vary in peace, and that their hiccup cures may always work. As for this explanation: I trust my source implicitly — he was busy very effectively and good-naturedly saving lives on a 24-hour shift when I ran into him — and, most to the point, this strategy works: reliably, past any possible doubt of its effectiveness when considered statistically, and to the endless amazement of many skeptical (and badly hiccuping) people across two continents.* Nuff said.

And now for the details on How To Cure Hiccups. ADDITIONAL AND IMPORTANT ADVISORY RIGHT UP FRONT: if you are on a sugar- or sodium-controlled diet of any kind, this solution is most likely not for you. Consult your physician before attempting it.

One afternoon [in 2011] while working, I found myself listening to a local TV station’s “science lady” attempting to explain the cause of hiccups… and getting it all wrong. As usual, this event makes me want to share what I was long ago taught about the subject by a medical resident in the emergency room at New York Hospital (now Cornell/NYH Medical Center). He took five minutes to explain the physiological mechanisms behind hiccups, and then taught me a simple, foolproof three-step method for stopping them dead.

So here’s The Hiccup Cure. (And if you share this around, please do so in some way that will allow as many people as possible to see it, so that more folks can be spared the Curse of Hiccup Embarrassment. Thank You For Your Continued Support.) 🙂

The explanation:Hiccups are the result of an chemical imbalance in your blood — a temporary derangement of the normal acid/alkaline balance of your blood electrolytes. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen all of a sudden, but the most common ones are talking too much while eating (my favorite), and eating or drinking too fast, and some kinds of emotional stress, and periods of sudden exercise (running for a bus, etc). Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance, but the commonest ones are these:

When you get one or the other of these, the body’s tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs’ contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn’t enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there’s too much, some can get out.

The body doesn’t want to bother your conscious mind with this, so it handles the problem in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm repeatedly, compressing the lungs and trying to shove a significant percentage of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, understanding this, you’d think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will. But it takes forever, and you meanwhile are sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves keep making the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take more drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the electrolyte imbalance significantly. The simple three-step intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn’t work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you’re most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

Step 1: Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, “calls off” the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The “spoonful of sugar” approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn’t work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

Step 2: Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It’s gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

Step 3: Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. (Or alternately, give them a small spoonful of vinegar if no lemon is available. But lemon works better.) Their hiccups will then vanish.

WARNING:It is vitally important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you’ll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you’re on a low-sodium diet or just don’t feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day.

But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups will vanish. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this routine.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane’s Law of Necessitative Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you’ll fall very low in their estimation if you don’t, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all three stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along and nothing seems to be working. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my producer for the “Science Challenge” educational series I wrote at the BBC: if I hadn’t proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And a note in passing: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures are, in one way or another, attempting to exploit this electrolyte-shift mechanism (though most of them are fairly ineffective at it). Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see _The Andromeda Strain_), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all merely thin pale versions of the One True Cure.

So there you have it. May it do you (and those around you) good. 🙂

*Still working on that third one.

The hiccup cure was last modified: April 25th, 2017 by Diane Duane

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The weather has been utter crap and yet another of this year’s named storms is passing over Ireland. Yet today it is nonetheless Spring. And needless to say, outside this blessed isle, the concept is causing some confusion.

From our Icelandic correspondent:

@ickle_tayto@dduane where the fuck can you count February as spring??
What kind of insane optimism??
No Love.
Iceland.
(-5°C this morn)

Well, Iceland’s calendar isn’t under my control (any more than the temperature: sorry Bjorn). Yet nonetheless it’s spring in Ireland.

This is because the first week of this month contains one of the great Cross-Quarter Days of the ancient Celtic calendar, Imbolc. (Cross-quarter days fall between a given solstice or equinox and the next solstice or equinox due along.) If you’re being super-accurate about the calculation, the day will wiggle around a little from year to year as the date and hour of the solstice in front of it and the equinox to come after it do the same. This year, for example, the “hard date” for Imbolc is February 4th. On that day the light of the Sun at dawn will pierce the inner chamber of the passage grave at the Mound of the Hostages at the Hill of Tara, illustrating that even as far back as Neolithic times, people felt the date was important. …But the “civil date” for Imbolc is February 1, making this the first day of Spring.

(The cross-quarter system, btw, explains why the summer solstice — usually around June 21 — is referred to colloquially as “Midsummer’s Day”. By the old calendar, the first day of Summer is the cross-quarter feast of Beltain / Beltane on May 1, and by the third week in June, summer’s already well finished with i-cumen in and is in fact half done.)

Imbolc is often thought of primarily as a lambing festival: the Gaeilge i mBolg more or less means “in the belly” and refers not just to the filling udders of the sheep but the bellies of sheep about to give birth. Those of our neighbors who practice artificial insemination on their flocks seem mostly to time the process to have the lambs pop out around now — either out of hard practical experience that this is the earliest that it’s safe to have your sheep lambing, or a feeling that maybe the ancients knew what they were up to, or possibly both.

The other big issue around here on this day is that February 1 is the feast day of St. Brigid — a.k.a. (before the Church got at her and attempted to make her safe. Good luck with that…) the great triune Celtic goddess Brigid* of the Fires — the queen of inspiration, poetic eloquence, and craftsmanship, patroness of poets, smiths and healers, and a fertility goddess on the side. (The Newgrange.com Imbolc page has some more about her and her relationship with the Saint.) Scholars have gone back and forth for a while whether the Goddess had any direct, specific connection with Spring herself. You could make a case, I suppose, for connecting her with other maiden goddesses like Persephone who have a springtime connection, and with Artemis, who though resolutely virginal was also the protectress of childbirth and all newborn and young things. Anyway, today’s Brigid’s day as well.

A final thought: over the past couple of days it’s been brought to my attention all over again that the increasing light and the days getting longer — always something really welcome at this latitude– are very much part of the business of Imbolc. The birds have started singing again, just now: rather hesitantly in some cases. …Though not all. The robin who sat outside the living room window yesterday was very much singing the Robinesque version of MINE, ALL THIS IS MINE, I AM A STUD, STAY OUT OF HERE BOYS OR I’LL KILL YOU, COME AND GET IT LADIES, I’VE GOT WHAT YOU WANT RIGHT HERE. Ah, the sweet innocent music of springtime. …Not.

*Also spelled Brigit, Brighid, Bride, Bridget, Bridgit, Brighde, and Bríd, and probably a bunch of other ways as well. Orthography: it’s a bitch.

Be Happy, It’s Imbolc was last modified: February 1st, 2018 by Diane Duane

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(First of all: is there some specific reason they used the Classic Star Trek font [or one very like it] for the warning panel on the bag? Is it somehow seen as “futuristic” to be afraid of chili heat? Just asking. But if so, I weep for my species.)

… It’s funny the things that can get your attention sometimes. At some point in the last couple of weeks, this post regarding someone who’d had a bad reaction to Doritos Roulette made its way across my Tumblr dashboard. I looked at the post and blinked a couple of times, said a couple of things under my breath about some of the more insensitive comments, and then went on with whatever I’d been doing.

But then, over the week that followed, it happened that I saw a couple of ads on TV for these chips, and I thought to myself, “Okay, now I’m curious. I’m a white girl; let’s see how I do with these.”

As background information for this experiment, it needs to be stated that we have two different kinds of “hot food people” in this house. As a New Yorker raised in the Metropolitan Area during a time when hot and spicy food was (for a suburban girl) harder to lay hands on for a good while, I got rapidly clued in in the 1970s, and developed a fair tolerance for heat in my food. Not huge, but fair. Six years in LA much improved this situation.

The other participant in this study is someone who, for a Belfast boy, stands out in having had a taste for the hot stuff that long precedes its now-widespread popularity in British mainstream culture. This is a man who has a whole shelf of hot sauces, and whose idea of what’s nice to put into a newly opened bag of crisps is one or more of the following:

(The two on the right are typical favorites that came from Oriental Emporium in Dublin until they stopped carrying it a few months back. The one on the left is something we picked up in passing in Austria in June, and originates apparently from a native Austrian company; causing Peter to remark, “Yet another reason to go back to Bregenz.”)

So your baseline here is two people one of whom has a significant tolerance for chili heat*, and one who has a mild tolerance but at the very least can be guaranteed not to faint dead away from shock at the taste of something spicy.

So, onward to the experiment.

We dumped about the third of the bag out onto a plate, as you see above. We were interested in doing visual examination first to see if there was any way to tell the doctored chips from the non-doctored ones. The company has been careful: visually, they are indistinguishable. Our guess is that all the chips are originally identical until a given number of them are separated out into a separate assembly line to be sprayed with chili extract.

PR stories about these chips indicate (per the company’s advisory) that the doctored ones have been sprayed with chili extract approaching the strength of a (mild) Scotch Bonnet / habanero chili at around 73,000 to 75,000 Scoville units (the not-mild ones can be double this, and they vary without warning). This is not exactly an entry-level strength. The average Jalapeño pepper clocks in at somewhere between 4000 and 7000 Scoville. To that end, I made sure that there was a tub of crème fraîche handy. This was for me and not for Peter. Habaneros generally are at the far upper end of my heat-tolerance ability, and I wanted to make sure that I had a fire extinguisher ready if it was needed. (As for Peter, even he has his limits. We have some Moruga Scorpions in the freezer in the moment, and he’s spent the last couple of months wondering what he can use them on/in that they won’t ruin. Too much heat is simply a waste of time.)

We proceeded by breaking chips in half and nibbling until we found hot ones, then exchanging them to see how hot they were—admittedly, a very subjective business—and how their heat persisted and built. There are some chili heats, after all, that flare quickly and die away quickly (like Tabasco), whereas others linger in your mouth and on your lips and tongue, and build—a cumulative heat. The hot chips in the Roulette bag have a cumulative heat, though not one that even by my standards would be tremendously strong. Both of us have over our time here had far hotter curries or chilies, and have drunk a lot of wine or eaten a lot of raita to to wrestle them down, but otherwise have suffered no ill effects.

Two interesting things immediately became apparent: (a) The heat is not consistent across the hot chips. Some, probably due to quirks in the manufacturing process, have been dosed harder than others. (b) There is some transference of the hot chili flavoring to non-hot chips. Peter and I both felt sure we were able to detect a difference in flavor between the ones that had been purposefully dosed with chili extract and the ones that had not. (Flavor is always an issue for us both in situations like this: we both like the heat, and sometimes both like it quite strong, but neither of us has any time for the witless application of pure extract-based heat without flavor.) Some of you will recall the old packaged-food warning, “Contents may have settled during transport”. My guess is that during the production and shipping process for these chips, there’s a lot of rubbing and jostling, and some of the hot coating on the dosed chips rubs off and gets on some of the others.

With this in mind, it does bear pointing out that there was a fair amount of the usual colored dust in the bag that one gets used to seeing in brightly colored junk foods. One wants to consider how easy it would be to inhale some of that dust… and what the results might be if the stuff got down into your bronchi. Even when just chewing and swallowing the hot chips in the normal way, both of us were caught at the back of our throats by the heat of the chili extract, and there was some discreet coughing from each of us (significantly more from me) until we swallowed once or twice. That dust struck me as an immediate possible cause for the problems experienced by the unfortunate girl in the Sun news story. And seriously—mock an asthmatic for having trouble with that? And for possibly having a reaction on top of it, secondary to inhaled dust contaminated with straight chili extract? “Judge not lest ye too be judged.”

Anyway. Our conclusions: if you are a person comfortable with fairly spicy food, you can safely eat these, but you may still be surprised — so take precautions. If you are not able to handle capsaicin-based heat, you might want to steer clear of these: the hot chips may cause you trouble.

Hope this helps anyone who might have had questions. Me, I’m going to finish off my share of the bag now and leave the rest for Peter. But I’ve got the crème fraîche ready…

*It’s interesting to note in passing here that while Peter has very significant tolerance for chili heat, he has almost no tolerance for (or patience with) the upward-rising horseradish-styleheat of the kind you get with wasabi, hot English or Chinese mustard, or a good Jewish horseradish. When ingesting such, it is my pleasure to sit there and happily enjoy the sensation of my sinuses getting blasted clear while he runs around flailing and shrieking. Okay, maybe not shrieking so much. But flailing, yeah; and he turns all pink.

What surprised me after the fact was that the very sight of a “candy corn bar” provoked such a strong reaction from me (“EWWWWWWWWW”) despite my being long past trick-or-treating age.

This response poked me in the curiosity nerve, a little, so I went looking for evidence of whether other people shared anything like it — this idea that some Halloween candies were “right” and others “wrong”.

And a little research suggests there seems to be a bone-deep conservatism on this issue, combined with some regional implications, as various Worst Halloween Candy lists seem to have areas where they agree and then others where they diverge or disagree strongly. (As an example: lists at BC Living, HuffPo (in fact they have a few of these), TopTenz, Serious Eats, Complex, Nooga…) Google will guide you to more if you feel the need for a broader statistical sample.

I always took Halloween very seriously while I was still of participating age, as my family wasn’t particularly well off and there wasn’t that much candy in my lifestyle except at chocolate-heavy holidays like Easter and Christmas. (Fortunately I slipped out of this stage just barely before the OMG BAD PEOPLE ARE PUTTING RAZOR BLADES IN THE APPLES thing got started.* I didn’t mind the apples. I knew they were traditional.) (As they still are in Ireland, which is after all where it all began. Apples and peanuts have been the trick-or-treat staple here for many years: only now are the candies starting to creep into the Irish tradition.)

So for what it’s worth: looking over these lists, I find some common ground, but not complete agreement.

Stuff I liked:

Candy corn… legit candy corn. (And still do.)

Those marshmallow peanuts. (Don’t ask me why.)

Tootsie Rolls. (In the 60s they were better than they are now. There seems to be so much wax in them now that you could stick wicks in them and light them as candles in emergency situations.)

Full size candy bars. I was never a Snickers person: I prefer my peanuts separate from candy, as a rule. (Also, no Reese’s Cups for me: you can keep your peanut butter OUT of my chocolate, thank you very much. If I want peanut butter I’ll go make a sandwich.) …Three Musketeers was (and when in the US still is) my preferred bar. I had a brief flirtation with Baby Ruths but it never came to anything. The US Mars bar was and is different from the UK one, but I like them both. (And steal Peter’s occasionally.)

Licorice, especially the long “licorice whips.” Preferably the red ones, though I didn’t mind the black. I may be the only kid I knew at that period who actually liked licorice. (But then I liked spinach, and liver. Even from a young age I felt that normalcy was boring / for other people: it’s probably no surprise in retrospect that I should have become a Sherlock Holmes fan.)

Nonpareils. Those used to turn up in little boxes in my part of the NY metropolitan area. God, but I loved those things. (And if you handed me a bag of them now you’d get it back empty.)

M&Ms. Chocolate, not peanut. The same as the nonpareils. Then and now I could go through a bag of M&Ms with terrifying speed.

Candy cigarettes. My one attempt to become a smoker failed miserably — how could anyone do that, I thought at the time, it tasted awful!! — but there was just something about the texture of these things, the crunch, that I adored. Suck it until it was gone? You must be joking. Gone in three crunches.

(Meanwhile, for those of you who’re feeling nostalgic: have a look at OldTimeCandy.com. They have the stuff arranged by decades.)

*Has anyone ever actually found a razor blade in an apple? I mean, verifiably? With pictures? Or is this one of those Urban Myth Coinciding With Early TV/Mass Media Attention Causes Hospital X-Ray Departments Nationwide To Waste Millions Of Person-Hours On One Day Each Year things?

(See also People Being Gassed In Sleeper Compartments of European Trains And All Their Stuff Stolen. I went hunting for non-anecdotal data on this some years back and couldn’t find anything. My firm belief is that back in the day, numerous weary and stressed-out travelers were careless / clueless about making sure their sleeper compartments’ doors were actually locked before they went to sleep, and then desperately needed a face-saving excuse the morning after opportunistic thieves, or in some cases their fellow sleeper compartment occupiers, had ripped them off while they slept through it like the dead. “I mean, I’m a light sleeper, I would’ve heard anybody come in unless something else was going on. It must have been gas! Gas!” …But I digress.)

Halloween Candy: an idle personal overview was last modified: September 17th, 2014 by Diane Duane

phaser, n.

2.Science Fiction. A weapon producing destructive laser or similar beams (of variable phase); spec. a (usually hand-held) device whose output can be varied to produce different effects on a target (as stunning, annihilation, etc.). Also in extended use and in figurative context.First used in the U.S. television series Star Trek.

1966 G. RoddenberryMemo 26 Apr. in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’iii. i. 272 Reference the mating of various components of the phaser weapons..when the hand phaser is mated to the pistol, they should appear as one weapon.

1967 Pop. Sci. Dec. 73/2 The main weaponry of the Enterprise is its banks of ‘ship’s phasers’,—artillery-size versions of the hand phasers and phaser pistols carried by the crew. These weapons are, of course, refinements of today’s familiar lasers.

1978 D. BloodworthCrosstalk xxxiii. 256 The USAAF had brought down the first unmanned plane with a laser, and..had..been thinking in terms of light, chemically-operated versions that could be phased together… ‘Phasers?’ ‘Phasers. Right.’

The following material is posted here purely for research purposes. (Yeah, everybody’s going to believe that.)

So I really like my chocolate. Well, this would hardly be news to anybody who reads my work, since it keeps popping up. (And believe it or not, no, the constant recurrences of Switzerland in my work have nothing to do with this. That’s a separate kink, a geographical and historical one. A coincidence, seriously.)

Anyway, the history of this unique substance has always interested me. but it wasn’t until very recently that I found out about the document reproduced below: a happy 17th-century combination of alchemical/pharmaceutical tract and shameless advertisement for a hot new fad food. (Those familiar with the food-as-medicine school of thought will find this interesting reading, though maybe this comes at the theme backwards and is more medicine-as-food.)

Chocolata Inda (or sometimes the title comes up as Inda Chocolata, depending on which edition you’vegot) was written first in Spanish by one Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, a physician to the Spanish court. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of information available about the man or his career, except that he was Andalusian and had previously published several works of materia medica (notably a work called Apologia chirurgica) before turning his hand to the chocolate end of things.

There seems also to be no indication of what made him do it, or what his affiliation might have been to the explorers or merchants who first brought chocolate to Spain from the New World. In any case, he was the first to write about the new wonder food. And he doesn’t mince his words. To hear Dr. Colmener tell it, the chocolate bean will cure just about everything that ails you. Particularly, though, he recommends it for male and female genitourinary health… with the emphasis on the “genito-“. And especially on the female end of things. Apparently it’ll put right about anything wrong with a woman’s nethers that can go wrong.

The title page of the English-language translation will give you a hint.

CHOCOLATE:
OR,
An Indian Drinke.

By the wise and Moderate use whereof,
Health is preserved, Sicknesse
Diverted, and Cured, especially the
Plague of the Guts; vulgarly calledThe New Disease; Fluxes, Consumptions,
& Coughs of the Lungs, with sundry
other desperate Diseases. By it
also, Conception is Caused,
the Birth Hastened and
facilitated, Beauty
Gain’d and continued.

Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colmenero
of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke,
and faithfully rendred in the English,

By Capt. James Wadsworth.

LONDON,
Printed by J. G. for Iohn Dakins, dwelling
neare the Vine Taverne in Holborne,
where this Tract, together with theChocolate it selfe, may be had at
reasonable rates. 1652

…So now you know where you can get the stuff as well. Isn’t that convenient? … And now a word from our sponsor. Sorry, sorry, our doctor.

The Confection it selfe, consists of severall Ingredients according to the different Constitutions of those that use it: the Principall of which is called Cacao, [a kind of Nut, or kernell, bigger then a great Almond, which growes upon a tree called the Tree of Cacao] containing in it the Quality of the Foure Elements, as will appeare in the following Discourse.

The vertues thereof are no lesse various, then Admirable. For, besides that it preserves Health, and makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable, it vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions. It quite takes away the Morphew, Cleanseth the Teeth, and sweetneth the Breath, Provokes Urine, Cures the Stone, and strangury, Expells Poison, and preserves from all infectious Diseases.

But I shall not assume to enumerate all the vertues of this Confection: for that were Impossible, every day producing New and Admirable effects in such as drinke it: I shall rather referre to the Testimony of those Noble Personages who are known constantly to use and receive constant and manifold benefits by it, having hereby no other Aime then the Generall good of this Common-wealth (whereof I am a Faithfull Member)

Then we get a preface from our British translator. He’s a hoot. He is very, very convinced, is Captain Wadsworth (or he’s on commission). He even writes a Poem in Praise of Divine Chocolate. He spends a little while dissing other schools of medical thought, and then gets down to business.

THE TRANSLATOR,
To every Individuall Man,
and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d,
Honest, or Dishonest: In the
due Praise of DivineCHOCOLATE.

Doctors lay by your Irksome Books
And all ye Petty-Fogging Rookes
Leave Quacking; and Enucleate
The vertues of our Chocolate.

Let th’ Universall Medicine
(Made up of Dead-mens Bones and Skin,)
Be henceforth Illegitimate,
And yeild to Soveraigne-Chocolate.

Let Bawdy-Baths be us’d no more;
Nor Smoaky-Stoves but by the whore
Of Babilon: since Happy-Fate
Hath Blessed us with Chocolate.

Let old Punctæus Greaze his shooes
With his Mock-Balsome: and Abuse
No more the World: But Meditate
The Excellence of Chocolate.

Let Doctor Trigg (who so Excells)
No longer Trudge to Westwood-Wells:
For though that water Expurgate,
’Tis but the Dreggs of Chocolate.

Let all the Paracelsian Crew
Who can Extract Christian from Jew;
Or out of Monarchy, A State,
Breake àll their Stills for Chocolate.

Tell us no more of Weapon-Salve,
But rather Doome us to a Grave:
For sure our wounds will Ulcerate,
Unlesse they’re wash’d with Chocolate.

The Thriving Saint, who will not come
Within a Sack-Shop’s Bowzing-Roome
(His Spirit to Exhilerate)
Drinkes Bowles (at home) of Chocolate.

His Spouse when she (Brimfull of Sense)
Doth want her due Benevolence,
And Babes of Grace would Propagate,
Is alwayes Sipping Chocolate…

…It goes on like that for a while. But ah yes, the babes (and not just in the older sense of the word): let’s not forget what this magic stuff does for them.

The Nut-Browne-Lasses of the Land
Whom Nature vayl’d in Face and Hand,
Are quickly Beauties of High-Rate,
By one small Draught of Chocolate.

…

’Twill make Old women Young and Fresh;
Create New-Motions of the Flesh,
And cause them long for you know what,
If they but Tast of Chocolate.

Leaving aside for the moment the fascinating way this poem handles the various ongoing 17th-century vowel shifts: Shut up and take my money.

Then come the testimonials. They sound about the way you expect they would: famous person says “Yes, I tried this, very impressive” in such a way as to not get in trouble later when something goes wrong.

After that we get a prolonged and doubtless very educational discussion of the qualities and virtues (oh, all right, “vertues” ) of the warm spices as compared to this new entry into the medico-culinary arsenal: all very Culpeperish. Nick would have eaten it up.

It may Philosophically be objected, in this manner: Two contrary Qualities, and Disagreeing, cannot be in gradu intenso, in one and the same Subject: Cacao is cold and drie, in predominency: Therefore, it cannot have the qualities contrary to those; which are Heat, and Moysture. The first Proposition is most certaine, and grounded upon good Philosophy: The second is consented unto, by all: The third, which is the Conclusion, is regular.

It cannot be denyed, but that the Argument is very strong, and these reasons being considered by him of Marchena, have made him affirme, that Chocolate is Obstructive; it seeming to be contrary to Philosophy, that in it there should be found Heat and Moysture, in gradu intenso; and to be so likewise in Cold and Dry.

To this, there are two things to be answered: One, that he never saw the experience of drawing out the Butter, which I have done; and that when the Chocolate is made without adding any thing to the dryed Powder, which is incorporated, onely by beating it well together, and is united, and made into a Paste, which is a signe, that there is a moist, and glutinous part, which, of necessity, must correspond with the Element of Aire.

No question whatsoever. Moving right along: we then are treated to several ways to compound chocolate as a drug, with a lot more about the Humours and so forth tucked in here and there. And then, finally, comes the layman’s recipe: which isn’t bad at all.

The manner of making Chocolate.

Set a Pot of Conduit Water over the fire untill it boiles, then to every person that is to drink, put an ounce of Chocolate, with as much Sugar into another Pot; wherein you must poure a pint of the said boiling Water, and therein mingle the Chocolate and the Sugar, with the instrument called El Molinillo, untill it be thoroughly incorporated: which done, poure in as many halfe pints of the said Water as there be ounces of Chocolate, and if you please, you may put in one or two yelks of fresh Eggs, which must be beaten untill they froth very much; the hotter it is drunke, the better it is, being cold it may doe harme. You may likewise put in a slice of white bred or Bisquet, and eate that with the Chocolate. The newer and fresher made it is, the more benefit you shall finde by it; that which comes from forreigne parts, and is stale, is not so good as that which is made here.

Meanwhile, here’s the lovely title page from the Nuremberg edition, in which the original Spanish has been translated into Latin. (I really think the Latin version of the title gains something absent from “Chocolate: or, an Indian Drinke,” though that has its own charms.) There are copies at the University Library of Eichstaett- Ingolstadt and at the City and State Library of Augsburg. Master listing at Gateway-Bayern here.) And just think, you an buy a copy in its original vellum wrapper, here. For €7500.

(Image above: the entry of the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute: via David Ronis)

I was bitten very early by the opera bug.

I think this happened in fifth grade or thereabouts. Our grade school music class got shoved into a bus and ferried into New York, where we spent a day with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and some people from the Metropolitan Opera, being shown the sights and talking to musicians and singers about what they did and how they did it. (Some of us got to actually conduct the Phil for twelve bars or so. Who cared that the orchestra was minus its second chairs? It was… quite something. …That’s another story.)

At the Met, anyway, we all got to sit down front in the expensive seats, and the chandeliers were retracted and lowered for us (which was seriously cool), and then the curtains parted and we found ourselves staring at a coloratura soprano with an afternoon to spare, standing near the top of a stepladder with a spotlight on her, wearing an amazing long glittery black dress and what appeared to be a crown of stars.

Then the conductor gave the downbeat, and the soprano opened her mouth and sang. And suddenly she was not just some singer on a stepladder but the local embodiment of Astrafiammante the Queen of the Night in all her pissed-off glory, absolutely shaking the rafters with what I know know to be one of the more difficult pieces of music in the operatic repertoire, but then simply sounded to me like a very angry angel looking for someone to deck out. I wasn’t entirely clear about the details of what she was singing then; I was way too blown away. I had never heard anything like this before. I… was… GONE.

So began what’s since become a lifelong fascination with this complex, sometimes crazy and almost always beautiful art form. I listen to opera when I’m happy or when I’m sad, and particularly when I need to force a mood shift for work’s sake. As a result, opera is rarely far from my writing: there are precious few of my books that I haven’t found a way to sneak opera into somehow (though mostly I try to be circumspect about it. You may only hear a little of the music in the background [as during Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses] or see it on stage in full view [as in Dark Mirror, with added Klingons]. But it’s usually lurking somewhere in the wings.)

The reason this comes up now is that the other day I was looking under the bed for something, and bumped into a big box of cassette tapes that Peter and I have been promising to strike to digital format for what seems like forever. There was the old tape deck, too, sitting there with that patiently aggrieved look that superannuated hardware visits upon you, having given you long and faithful service and still having been abandoned. I said “Oh, what the hell?”, pulled out the deck and the box of tapes, went through the usual frustrating search for cables with which to get the cassette deck talking to the big desktop machine’s sound card, found the cables in less than half an hour (which is in itself a small miracle around this place: other hardware geeks will know how cables both simultaneously pile up and still manage to hide themselves from you when urgently needed), did the hooking up, and started going through the box.

Oh, memories. There is nothing quite so evocative of Nostalgia For Your Lost Youth as going through old hand-made cassette mix tapes.

One tape, though, when I picked it up, jogged my memory unusually hard: because I realized already had a dub of what was on it — albeit not a great one, done some years back. And thereby hangs a tale.

Those of you who live in Los Angeles, or have National Public Radio stations near you, may (or indeed should) know of the funny, erudite and utterly melliflous music commentator named Jim Svejda (it’s pronounced SHVAY-duh), who operates out of the venerable and much-loved classical music station KUSC. Jim has has been there seemingly since dinosaurs walked the earth, running their Evening Program and just getting better and better all the time. (This goes for his voice too, which is possibly one of the reasons I like Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice so much: in some modes it reminds me strongly of Svejda’s.) I have been this man’s fan since I first heard him: he is, for this reason, probably the only member of KUSC’s staff to appear in a Star Trek novel.

For years and years Jim hosted a syndicated show called The Opera Box in which every week he shared his passion and wisdom about all things operatic (not to mention his extraordinary audio collection). Now, since KUSC is a public-supported station, which once or twice a year slows things down to run pledge drives, Jim at such times would put together unusual “special features” which would be aired a little at a time until people had called in to pledge enough money to get that particular recording rolling again.

One of these was a hysterical farrago called “Il Barbieri von Nuremberg”, a totally crazed piece of business in which Svejda cobbled together a truly Frankenstein-monsterish fake opera out of bits and pieces of operatic works both famous and obscure, constructed a beyond-wacky plot for the thing, and then supplied it with his own commentary in that lovely dark voice of his. Somehow or other I failed to get that on tape, which still drives me crazy sometimes.

But I did manage to tape the sequel that Jim did the following year (1981, I think), “Il Barbieri von Nuremburg Strikes Back.” This purports to contain excerpts of the lost bel canto opera Lucia di Liverpool, as performed by the Omsk People’s Lyric Theatre, Tractor Sales and Service.

It’s madness.

And now at last I have an MP3 of it — or what I was able to get of it, back in the day when in the middle of a live recording you had to sit there hovering over the machine waiting for the tape to run out, then break out in a sweat as you cued the flip side and started recording again. In particular — besides the numerous crazy symphonic and other musical interludes that Svejda has tucked into this thing — I direct your attention to the 25:00 minute mark (or this separate 3-minute MP3), and Jim’s truly nutso version of the famous tenor aria Di quella pira, into which he inserts the voices of at least twenty-five different tenors*, flawlessly pitch- and tempo- matched (this was way before the software that now makes such things easy: Svejda would have most likely done this with a transcription table), and which is frankly the damndest display of virtuoso scissorwork I’ve ever heard.

…So here it all is, in MP3 format. The main file is just short of an hour long (about 60 megabytes): you may or may not be able to get it to stream for you — I’d guess that will depend on your software.

One caveat: please note that the sound quality on this dub is NOT great at the very beginning, though it improves considerably after the first ten minutes. (The tape was already pushing at least twenty-five years old when I initially struck it to CD, after all, and some stretch-distortion at the ends, and a little print-through, would have been unavoidable.) The rest of the hour isn’t bad, despite the occasional hiss of FM signal drift; and now that I have better equipment, and way better audio tools, over the next couple of days I’m going to see if I can get an improved dub off the original tape.

Anyway: enjoy!

*Possibly more. I lost count.

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A Day at the Opera (part 1): "Il Barbieri von Nuremburg" and other madness was last modified: May 25th, 2017 by Diane Duane

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A peculiar thing happens in a number of European countries, mostly (but not all) German-speaking, on or around New Year’s Eve. The TV stations begin showing the same brief comedy sketch again and again. What’s truly unusual about this is that the sketch is in English — recorded nearly 50 years ago in front of a German audience — and has since become a cult classic. For a surprising number of German-speaking people, the words “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” are not only the English-language phrase they know best, but are held in the same kind of humorous context as the phrases “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or “It is an ex-parrot!”

The sketch “Dinner for One” — the German name of the sketch translates as “The 90th Birthday” — doesn’t really have anything to do with New Year’s (though one “virtually present” character does say “Happy New Year” at one point, which may be the source of the confusion). It tells the story of a birthday party. Miss Sophie (played by actress May Warden, who later appeared on Doctor Who and A Clockwork Orange) is 90, and the table is set for herself and her four friends: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommeroy, and Mr. Winterbottom. Unfortunately time has taken its inevitable toll, and of the five of them, only Miss Sophie is still alive.

Assisting at dinner is James, Miss Sophie’s butler (played by veteran British comedian Freddie Frinton). It falls to him not only to serve dinner, but to impersonate the four missing dinner guests for a lady who may or may not be entirely clear that they’re no longer among the living. As part of the act, James has to drink their traditional toasts to Miss Sophie — all of them — and becomes progressively more sloshed and goofy as dinner progresses. But he just keeps soldiering on — serving dinner and “channeling” the four missing guests, while also locked in silent battle with the tigerskin that lies in wait for him every time he makes another circuit of the table.

The sketch is a tremendous showcase of Freddie Frinton’s complete mastery of comic timing, and for a long time we were forced to simply describe it at one remove to people who hadn’t been in a country where and when it was being aired. But time has moved along, taking “Dinner for One” with it into the new century, and the whole business is now happily viewable on YouTube — both in its original black and white, and in a newer colorized version. I’ve embedded the color version here, because it’s not a bad effort: but there are those who much prefer the black and white version — I’d be one — and the link to that is here. (Note that the original German version starts with a gentle intro by a German-speaking host, who explains what’s forthcoming to those who haven’t seen it before, and more or less reassures the audience that it’s okay to find this poor dotty old lady a bit amusing. If you prefer to skip the intro, advance the video to about the 2min:25sec stage.)

A holiday tradition has built up around “Dinner for One” in the German-speaking countries of central Europe, and elsewhere too (in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and as far afield as New Zealand). On New Year’s eve it shows on practically every TV network, public or private, in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Some of them show it several times back to back. (At least one of the channels within the last few years showed it for 24 hours straight… quite a run for an eleven-minute short.) It also appears in dubs in many regional European dialects, and even in Latin.

All this loving attention has won “Dinner for One” the uncontested title as the single most rerun piece of standalone television on Earth. People stage drinking games around it; they hold dinner parties based on the one that James serves to Miss Sophie; they hunt down the best recipes for “the fowl” and that “North Sea haddock”; they enthusiastically debate the choice of the wines that go with each course. The skit’s fandom includes millions of people across all walks of life who have nothing in common except this one remarkable piece of comedy, to which they return year after year — most of them swearing that a New Year’s without it is simply unthinkable.

The aspect of this phenomenon that remains truly bizarre is that though “Dinner for One” was filmed in the UK, it’s never been aired there except in one seconds-long excerpt on that most excellent of quiz shows QI, and is almost completely unknown to British people. Every now and then it pops up on the British radar due to very occasional coverage in the UK press, like this 2002 article in the Guardian and this one in 2004: but then it vanishes again. The BBC seems uninterested in airing it: they apparently don’t think it’s funny. (And they have no answer whatsoever for why the Germans, who most British people apparently seem to think have no sense of humor, find the “Dinner for One” skit hilarious and will recite it to each other, in English [whether they understand the English or not] as if it was a Monty Python skit.)

This is a situation that probably won’t change any time in the near future. But “Dinner for One” itself is worth spreading around for its gentle awesomeness. Meanwhile, over at EuropeanCuisines.com, we’ve posted recipes / articles on the four courses:

“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its meta qualities.)

So I’ve posted over here what an animation writer who was in a hurry (and possibly a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80’s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

(ETA: sorry for the delay in this, folks: I wound up wrestling with a cold over the last few days, and it slowed things up.)

Here’s the original Kim Possible episode, so that everyone has a referent for the peculiarities to follow.

Coming December 3-4: "The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank" was last modified: December 2nd, 2011 by Diane Duane

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My husband likes to smell good in lots of different ways. As a result, he collects colognes — almost none of them the big names familiar in high-street shops and department stores. What P. mostly likes are less well known fragrances like the Extract of West Indian Lime from Geo F. Trumper’s, or the terrific “Number Six” made by Caswell-Massey, a former favorite of George Washington’s (the Marquis de Lafayette sent him some: the company apparently still has the sales order).

Just about his only venture into mainstream fragrancing has been at the Crabtree & Evelyn end of things. But this has proven very frustrating over time, as he keeps finding colognes there that he likes, and almost as soon as he finds them, C&E in turn discontinues them. Their “Gentlemen’s Cologne” was the first of his favorites to go this way (and though it was an okay fragrance, I can’t say I wept too much over this, as the stuff was so heavy on the bitter aloes and myrrh that kissing him was like getting up close and personal with a nail-biting cure).

But they also discontinued one that was way more pleasant, and had an interesting history. “Hungary Water” is short for “Queen of Hungary Water”, a modern version of what may be the oldest compounded fragrance on record (the OED citations go back to the 1500’s; the fragrance itself may be much older, dating back to the 1300’s or thereabouts depending on which Queen you think you’re dealing with). It’s really terrific, a fresh clean aromatic scent; but P. won’t use it because the one bottle is all he’s got. And in this economy, our original plan of eventually taking the stuff to Paris and hiring a parfumier to analyze and reproduce it is going to have to wait.

“The water (containing an infusion of spirits) is admirable cure-all remedy of all kinds of cold and humidity-induced head ailments, apoplexies, epilepsies, dizziness, lethargy, crippleness, nerves diseases, rheumatism, flaws, spasms, loss of memory, coma, drowsiness, deafness, ear buzzing, derangement of vision, blood coagulation, mood-induced headaches headaches. Relieves toothache, useful for stomach cramps, pleuritis, lack of appetite, indigestion, obstruction of the liver, obstruction of the spleen, intestinal obstruction and contraction of the uterus. It receives and preserves natural heat, restores body functions and capabilities even at late age (saying has it). There are not many remedies producing that many good effects. Use internally in wine or vodka, rinse temples, breath in with your nose.”

(Wow, Nick, is there anything this stuff doesn’t do?)

Anyway, while the above variants are interesting in their way, my normal response when trying to find the best version of a traditional fragrance is to try to figure out where the source is, and get some there (as, for example, what you would consider the trope namer if this was going to be TV Tropes: if you’re into cologne, you go to Köln / Cologne, where they have for centuries made 4711 and its great rival Farina, and there are huge noisy tussles in the media as to which one is most traditional or best).

So theoretically, for Hungary water, it makes a certain amount of sense to look around for it in Hungary. All I need to know now is: what is Hungary water called in Hungary? Does it have a Magyar name, or are they using French terminology for it (which was commonplace enough in previous centuries)? And if the stuff is still distilled there, is there one Hungary water that claims to be the original one / best? When we have enough data, and especially if there are more than one of these colognes extant, we can hunt them down, try them out, and see which one is nicest.

Anyway, if anyone has info about this, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

(Queen of) Hungary Water: an inquiry was last modified: November 14th, 2016 by Diane Duane

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The ScoobyThon on Cartoon Network continues, much to Peter’s helpless dismay. I left a videotape recording on super-slow last night and actually managed to catch my very first piece of TV work, a deathless thing which revels in the title “The Hairy Scare of the Devil-Bear.” It features two characters named after Larry and Fuzzy Niven, this being its only possibly claim to any kind of fame whatsoever.

I wish they would just “strip” the things in temporal order so that I could get all my taping done at once, but there’s no way they’re going to do that: even middle-of-the-night viewers would be bored witless. Oh well. It’s been educational watching excerpts from The Many Lives of Scooby and noting highs (Shaggy unpacks a suitcase and mutters, “I guess I’d better dress for dinner.” — at which point we see the suitcase is full of identical green floppy T-shirts…) and lows (right now the group is having a run in with, not just a ghost, but a ghost spaceman. Argh).

The only thing about this exercise that’s really beginning to get under my skin would be the incessant (five per hour, at least) commercials for a relentlessly insipid MOR collection of Christian music called “Songs 4 Worship”. “Millions have Experienced the Glory!” the announcer intones. Well, if they have, it’s been despite the music, not because of it. I’m going to have to listen to the B Minor Mass about thirty times to get the sound of some of these things out of my head. The heck with you, Time Life Warner AOL Whatever! (Yeah, I know, I work for Warner sometimes. Sometimes the King’s Shilling looks more tarnished than others.) (But I’ll take the heck-wish back the minute that the story editor on Justice League calls me and asks me to write a Green Lantern script. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)

ScoobyThons and other local distractions was last modified: July 30th, 2002 by Diane